The authors shared a replication package with all of the data, which more researchers should do: https://zenodo.org/records/23019736

I find their methodology misleading, though. They're basically taking the cost of transmission infrastructure upgrades and then assigning the cost of those upgrades proportional to peak energy demand of the customer base, not the cost of the infrastructure upgrade.

So if, for example, they estimate that residential customer demand will grow by 10%, then they suggest residential customers should only be paying for 10% of transmission infrastructure upgrades.

That's not how infrastructure upgrades work, though. Connecting 100,000 new residential addresses and areas can cost more than a couple data centers that are close to the power station.

The problem is they don't have access to, or at least they didn't look very hard, to find the actual data about transmission line upgrades and how much data centers actually pay to get connected. Contrary to what I see in a lot of the comments here, big customers do actually get billed for their infrastructure upgrade costs after utilities do their analyses. This paper is ignoring the utilities' analyses and substitutes their own highly simplified proportional-to-peak-demand estimates, and that's how they get their headline number.

One very surprising discovery was that they show data center construction incentives to actually be a good deal:

> State incentives for data centers have provided returns on the investments, if inconsistently, the researchers found. Some states, such as California, reaped $180 in worker income for every dollar spent, while Virginia increased income $2 for every dollar invested. The researchers determined that the presence of an existing, qualified workforce was a stronger indicator of high returns than the amount of incentive spending.

That's not what I expected to read.

This is a topic where details basically don't matter for public opinion, though, so I'm not sure it matters. It aligns with what people